‘Chef’: A Reluctant Foodie’s Review

In Chef, Jon Favreau plays a a critically-acclaimed chef who wants to continue to grow and evolve creatively, while hemmed in by market forces pushing him to keep doing what he’s been doing, no matter how bored and unfulfilled it leaves him — the eternal artist’s dilemma. “Play your hits,” the restaurant owner played by Dustin Hoffman tells him. He sucks it up and abandons his new menu, his passion project, in favor of the old menu he’s sick of and doesn’t really believe in, the one people supposedly expect, the one they demand. Naturally, he gets pilloried by the local food critic (Oliver Platt) for it. “Chef Carl Casper’s recent weight gain can only be explained by the fact that he must be eating all the food that gets sent back to the kitchen,” goes the review, in probably the funniest scene of the movie.

From there, Favreau’s chef (accurately rendered, with the requisite food-related forearm tats) goes home to drown his sorrows in olive oil and starch, cooking up a batch of sizzling onions and garlic, mixed with cheese and spaghetti, finished off with chopped parsley, lovingly twisted to perfection and served up to his waiting hostess/mistress, played by Scarlett Johansson, who’s sitting on his bed, rightly turned on by the whole scene (I actually tried my pasta like this, instead of adding tomatoes, and it was delicious). As a guy who DVRs at least 10 different cooking shows, including MTV’s God-awful Real World with cooking, House of Food, there are few things I like more than watching someone lovingly prepare a plate of food. For me, watching a guy chop up onions and brown them in olive oil is like being wrapped in a blanket and handed a golden retriever puppy – it’s my happy place. Add to that food as a metaphor for the creative process, a garlic scented world of snarky haters, and a soundtrack full of ska, and for a few minutes I wondered if Favreau was filming live from Vince’s Wheelhouse, dead center. It was like being in some Matrix world where a malevolent force knew exactly how to make me feel most comfortable so they could tap my brain and scoop out my stem cells for their reactor machine.

The basic idea behind Chef is “How Jonny Fat Tits Got His Groove Back,” with a food truck playing the proverbial Taye Diggs. He takes a chance, strikes out on his own, and gets to know his neglected son, who comes to work with him on his truck. Simple, but I was fine with that, especially when you throw in John Leguizamo and Bobby Cannavale as Favreau’s wisecracking kitchen crew, who are great in everything, but have an especially great rapport between the three of them (remember, once upon a time, Jon Favreau built an entire career on understanding dude-group dynamics in Swingers). It’s pretty ridiculous to write yourself into a love triangle between Scarlett Johansson and Sofia Vergara when you look like Jon Favreau (or me, or anybody but Tom Hardy, really), but the fact that his character is a pseudo celebrity chef and Scarlett Johansson is his restaurant hostess makes it believable enough. I’ve worked in a few restaurants, and never was there a time where someone wasn’t banging the hot hostess. If you want to sleep with hot 20-somethings until you’re 45, working in a restaurant is definitely your best bet, short of being famous.

I so wish Chef was just food porn artist wish fulfillment, but Favreau also seems to have an Aaron Sorkin-esque fascination with computers and social media, built on a grandpa-like understanding of this brave new world of ones and zeroes. When Favreau’s son becomes their food truck’s de facto cyber publicist, the film shifts gears from its sweet spot as food porn into a sort of fifth grade book report on social media. Note to aging screenwriters: Twitter is not magic. I could go my entire life without hearing another movie character intone gravely “It went viral.” “Kids be tweetin’” is the new “Women be shoppin’.”

I love food, but even if you don’t drool over the food network or follow celeb chefs like rock stars, there’s something universal about the creation of the perfect plate of food. Food fascination isn’t about name-dropping or celebrities or a British guy calling fat people donkeys, it’s simply about someone taking pride in what they do. We live in a world where the harder it is to explain what the f*ck your job is, the more money you tend to make. Which makes it all the more pleasing to see someone fulfill one of the most basic human needs – eating – while taking the utmost pride in their product. Taking pride in the product over the monetary reward gets me every time (I put love in these reviews, dammit, I promise I could do a lot less work for a lot more clicks).

Not only that, but cooking is a celebration of getting your hands dirty. From “humane” executions and video game drone strikes to meat that only exists covered in plastic for most people and crucial technological processes that only .00001% of the world actually understands, we’re so divorced from the process of things nowadays that it’s beautiful to see something go from farm to table (to borrow a foodie cliché). There’s a fantastic moment in Chef where Favreau and his son are cleaning out their broken down old food truck, and the son, so excited about the venture up until this point, balks at having to clean up a food tray full of moldy, disgusting old food. Favreau yells at him, and it starts their first argument. You can’t make pretty food without getting elbow deep in guts and nastiness from time to time, so hold your nose and grow some balls, little man, this is what it takes to become an adult. As a person who gets livid watching House of Food, seeing full-grown adults who supposedly want to cook steaks for a living get squeamish at the sight of a side of beef, I could not possibly endorse this moment more. F*ck your squeamishness, ostrich! Your cozy bed is a nest of lies! Phew, okay, sorry about that, I have some strong opinions about hash browns.

As much as I love all things food, there’s a reason I never refer to myself as a “foodie,” other than the fact that it’s basically a synonym for “asshole” to a lot of people. To me there’s a clear distinction between food porn and food propaganda. To wallow in the sensual pleasure of creating food – slicing onions, crushing garlic, butchering meat, dredging, braising, carmelizing, tenderizing, emulsifying – that’s food porn. I could jack off to that if my belly had a boner. The part where you talk about famous chefs and restaurants and artisan whatever, the craft cocktail movement and Alice Waters inventing “California Cuisine,” that’s food propaganda. As obnoxious as someone name-dropping their favorite indie bands or spouting buzz terms at their start-up’s investors round table. Oh, you’re an ideation ninja, and Sanjay here is your disruption guru, you say? Please die in a dildo fire.

Chef is mostly about food porn, especially at the beginning, but there are a few times when it crosses the line into bullshit foodie propaganda. I probably could’ve done with the gratuitous product placement for Cafe Du Monde and its world famous beignets if there wasn’t also a scene where everyone jizzes their pants about Franklin’s BBQ in Austin, Texas, which anyone in the entire world who has been to Austin, Texas is more than familiar with. Chef would’ve been a lot more tolerable if they’d dropped one of them or fictionalized both. That’s not a celebration of the process, it’s shitty name-dropping. It’s the difference between filming Faye Reagan screwing and filming five guys standing around talking about her puffy nipples. Which do you want to watch?

Despite its techno-rube qualities, Chef admirably avoids most of the hoary bloggers-as-haters clichés, painting Oliver Platt’s food critic fairly accurately as an articulate enthusiast of the shit he’s writing about, rather than the usual embittered failure who hates, because jealousy is all he knows. And when Favreau’s Chef Carl gets pissed, most of the anger comes from knowing the critic is right. You don’t get angry at a critic who gets it wrong, you get angry at the one who gives voice to your own self-doubt.

All in all, Chef is a bit of a mixed bag (flavor profile is a bit muddled, could use a little zest to brighten it up), but god damn is it delicious to see Jon Favreau back doing a passion project. Movies, like food, are always better when it feels like the person making them is excited to serve them to you.

Had a feeling this would be in my wheelhouse as well.
Food-nerd tangent: I keep the “Spain” (the one with the dude who figured out how to grill caviar) and “El Bulli” episodes of “No Reservations” on pretty much all devices at all times. Those are my “Steel Magnolias”.

I don’t think it’s that some people have a dislike of food or music but just that they can take it or leave it. They’ll eat whatever is in front of them and not particularly be excited for anything specific. Some people just casually enjoy things on a peripheral level but I swear if it’s one thing I’m usually able to talk to most people about, food is one of the bigger common interests since we all eat.

It’s absolutely fascinating to me how cooking and food in general has had such a renaissance in the last two decades. You didn’t find many guys who knew how to cook in the 90’s unless they did it for a living and “celebrity chefs” pretty much didn’t exist back then. I suppose you can thank cable TV and the internet for the resurgence, but it’s great to see how much more respect the cooking profession gets these days.

I look at chefs or anybody who can make a tasty, beautiful plate of food just like I do a true musician, with awe & respect. I can make dinner, but I can’t do the stuff that they do, just like I can’t play an instrument to save my life. But I can appreciate those who do & those who give their talents to the world for us to enjoy.

Hostesses are pretty much always cunts- bitching at the bussers because a table isn’t ready instead of actually doing anything, almost always getting the job because of a perv manager or a manager that wants to keep his girlfriend in sight.

Kitchen Confidential is pretty much my desert island book that I read at least a few times a month just for Tony’s brilliant descriptions of how great food is made. It’s also a devastatingly hilarious description of what working in a restaurant is really like. Everyone is screwing everyone, half the kitchen staff is in the country illegally, is insane or both, and everyone is either an alcoholic or a drug-addict (or both).

And I love Favreau as a writer/director, so I can’t wait to see this. Swingers and Made are stone-cold classics. And I don’t care what people say, the second Iron Man and Cowboys and Aliens are both awesome.

After some exhausting research that used up about four minutes and two handfuls of tissue, I can confirm that Faye Reagan is indeed NOT in this movie. However, she IS in The Breakfast Club: A XXX Parody. It’s sort of a food movie . . .

As a guy who worked as a baker for several years, I really like both cooking and baking, but man, I could not give less of a shit about presentation. That aspect of taking the extra time to put a stupid garnish on just leaves me cold. Nobody fucking likes parsley, I don’t care what people say.

Agreed. Over-emphasis on presentation just seems like an attempt to distract you from the fact that you’re paying $39.95 for a venison medallion the size of an apricot pit with some frizzed beet on it.

“We live in a world where the harder it is to explain what the f*ck your job is, the more money you tend to make. Which makes it all the more pleasing to see someone fulfill one of the most basic human needs – eating – while taking the utmost pride in their product. Taking pride in the product over the monetary reward gets me every time (I put love in these reviews, dammit, I promise I could do a lot less work for a lot more clicks).”

Vince having worked in restaurants, you are spot on about the assbaggery behind a cook having a forearm tattoo of a pig (or some other culinary thing). It would be more accurate though if Favreu was shown ripping Camel Crushes behind the food truck.

I just realized that I was sitting here with an episode of “Chopped” on the TV while I read this…
(On the bright side – this now means Vince and I can be super best friends or something, right? Wheelhouse and what not?)

So Favreau plays an artist who goes through a crisis when he’s pigeonholed into repetition. His wife is fiiiine, but he also is banging Scarlett Johansson at work out of some egotistical need for younger adoration. He also requires Robert Downey Jr. for money and influence. He has a love/hate relationship with quip heavy critics who aren’t wrong about his stagnation, but may not realize he doesn’t exactly have control over his product. This begs a question in my mind….

1) I am so torn on the romanticizing of chefs and the life. I love Bourdain and used to watch lots of food shows (before having a babby), and I still love to cook. I am above average at it and there is something enticing about the ritual, the process, the freestyling of ingredients and deviating from recipes… the whole thing. It is very Zen. At the same time I hate the whole “they are super rebels who do coke and rock out and they are the new Keruacs and Warhols blah blah blah.” GFY. You make food. Shut up.

2) I worked at two restaurants. You know who was fucking the hot hostess? Her boyfriend. The chefs nailed dirty skanks.

Great review, and I loved the soapbox rant about the kid needing to learn to take out the trash.

I do take issue with you lumping ” the craft cocktail movement” in with douchebaggery. I think it’s simply outgrouping on your part, because just like the difference between people who love food and the process and craftsmanship of cooking and sourcing and the “foodie” crowd, there is a difference between those that source and craft spirits (particularly the craftsman making good small batch spirits) and preparing good or original drinks, and the dickhead twirling his mustache at your local steampunk 20s era faux speakeasy, who just spends 30 minutes muddling your old fashion while telling you about his art.

The spaghetti looked great and all, but seriously…gimme one of those CUBANOS. And that grilled cheese he made for his kid…sploosh. What really pissed me off though…anytime they asked the kid what he thought after they let him taste what they made, his reaction was always, “yeah, it’s pretty good.” This kid needs to learn some damn adjectives so he can properly describe his experiences.